Monday, 18 August 2008

A few railway journeys

Between Paris and Orleans, or perhaps Tours, past midnight in late summer. It's the overnight service for Tarbes and Irun out of Austerlitz. It seems too early for all the other passengers to sleep, but they do, and I nustle into the pale green fabric of my recliner seat and remove my plimsolls and socks. It isn't easy: I've walked fourteen miles at least, up and down hills in Montmartre, and in endless circles that always seem to lead back to Chatelet RER. My feet are actually black and blue. As I open a can of Heineken, the conductor opens the carriage door and turns out the overhead lamps. The train seems to slow down as we run along a ridge above a light industrial estate.

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Cheshire, between Stockport and Macclesfield, at midday in early December. Clutching a warm can of Stella and still feeling pissed from Norwich the evening before, I chatter annoyingly at my younger brother. Our little DMU is running along the edge of an escarpment, the farmable western fringe of the Pennines. Mild sunshine hasn't lifted the white dusting off the fields yet. I shut up as the noise of our train distracts a fox, causing him to run away from the sheep he'd been chasing.

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An hour and a half north of Coimbra, Portugal. I awake and rub my eyes, then see the three Parisian likely lads we'd been drinking with the night before asleep in a pile on top of one another. My bladder is bursting. It's six-thirty in the morning as we pass through a forest which has recently been burnt to the stumps. I drink a coffee and press my nose to the window as this scene scrolls by, interminably.

*

Summer, 2007. Having managed - for once - to find a seat on the northbound GNER, I'm teaching myself to use a new camera. In the weedy plain where ridings touch, the line threads between the power stations of Knottingley, Drax, and Ferrybridge; the train slows so I can capture a set of black smokestacks. Later, I learn that several of the cooling towers at Ferrybridge blew down in a gale during the late 1960s.

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The air conditioning fails as we pass the airport at Monfalcone. A large Serbian family move into the next car.

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Pulling into Melton Mowbray on a cross-country service as a man, just released from jail, threatens his girlfriend on the phone because she has bounced cheques in his absence. I'm returning from my first-ever academic conference.

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Falling over reading Pierre Reverdy in the vestibule at Grantham.

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On the way to play a gig, far too full of caffeine, talking to a man with a folding bicycle on a delayed First Great Western service in between Reading and Oxford.

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Any time that you haven't been to Scotland for a while and the back of Arthur's Seat appears after Prestonpans.

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An East Anglian winter's evening as scripted by M.R. James, returning from a symposium in rainy Cambridge. I'm on the phone to Dad. Suddenly, hilariously, I realise that I'm on the wrong train and that my trip home will consequently take an extra hour and a half. Because my situation is already thoroughly over-determined, I open the first page of The Emigrants by W.G. Sebald.